"Realism Isn't Even Realistic"

     In Rachel Cusk's novel Kudos, there's no plot. A writer travels by plane to a literary event. People, mostly strangers, speak to her (or at her) in lengthy unbidden self-revelations and philosophical disquisitions at every point in her journey. No innocuous chitchat. No polite silence. Nightmarish.

Endless one-sided exchanges aren't necessarily boring but they're always fatiguing, I've found. A boss, a store clerk, a man on the train have all earned my awe and irritation, talking for twenty, thirty minutes without permitting me to contribute a complete sentence or make for the exit. Since the narrator of the novel is mostly absent, the risible effect of longwindedness is transferred to the page, intentionally or not. So it's perfectly natural to respond inwardly with jokes and fantasies of rudeness while reading it: massive sighs, dark mutterings, fatal leaps from the nearest window, that sort of thing. Only one character has the courtesy to acknowledge that he might be talking her ear off.

In other words, the concept of the book, at least, is tempting to spoof. However, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it on those grounds, as a journalist who is supposed to interview the narrator does when he meets her at a dinner. He looks forward to speaking to her, he says, because he can ask her one question and let her write the rest of the interview with her reply. Perhaps Cusk allows that his ambush is clever. Yet it's also cheap and probably a sign of laziness too: He's apparently made no effort to consider whether the people in her books actually have something to say. If Kudos is any indication, they clearly do.

Cusk's iciness is of a familiar kind. She closely analyzes physical appearance and is often unflattering. She doesn't let the odd gesture or posture or facial expression go unnoticed. She evinces little or no affection. One gets the sense at times that she's in the habit of rendering a final verdict on someone at a glance. Clinical lucidity, bordering on uncharitable. Most writing like this sounds interchangeable, gray and suffocating. I put down The Bradshaw Variations for that reason. But in Kudos, Cusk mitigates it to an extent with a surprising sense of humor and an eye for the absurd. The book begins with a good simple comic situation: a giant man struggling to position himself properly in a little airplane seat. Sometimes she's dryly amusing. Sometimes she's openly, humorously scornful. And, as mentioned before, she even includes a mean witticism at her expense.

In any case, the narrator's presence is minimized as the people she meets take turns at center stage. The variety elevates the book, though not as much as it could, since I don't think the individual voices are fully realized - too scripted, too polished in language and rhythm to ring true as common, improvised speech. But it does work as a gallery of different perspectives on the self, appearances, relations between men and women, literary culture, and other subjects. Part of the difficulty for the reader lies in how frequently they go unchallenged. One woman examines the worst of herself, comes to questionable conclusions, and somehow goes no further. And the listener, obviously perceptive, nevertheless doesn't rouse her in any way before moving on to the next one. And the next one. There are stretches in which the countervailing forces of moderation and doubt are nowhere to be seen. Shaky arguments abound. It's annoying. This is no accident.

Not that it's necessary but other people are more companionable. And the narrator does finally speak at length. Her words, suggesting a kind of personal ceasefire, are among the most measured and, therefore, refreshing. Directly confronted with an ugliness hinted at by several women along the way, she isn't indifferent. She's unfazed.

It is the last book of a trilogy, all in a similar style. I'm not sure if I'll check out the others. Cusk has come to abhor fiction. But instead of writing another autobiography, for which she's received much censure, she wrote these. Kudos does not strike me as anything other than fiction. Harold Bloom: "Realism isn't even realistic." Particularly so in this novel. I haven't encountered anyone who can convince me it is a masterpiece, though there seem to be many who've deemed it so, even while identifying many of the same flaws I have. It isn't a masterpiece. It isn't a near-masterpiece. It's an uneven but intriguing experiment in avoiding the trap of narcissism that makes autofiction an inherently dubious way forward.

Little Seen and Underappreciated (Still)

     Ada Wolin, at times, offers a sharp observation about the music. She provides some useful information. Otherwise, what I said in passing to my brother Miguel, another fan of the group, midway through the Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las hasn't changed: the Shangri-Las are fun and the book is not.

I'm sorry to say so because there doesn't seem to be much written about them and I had high hopes that they'd finally receive loving treatment. But the analysis is too dry and dispassionate to be called loving. In fact, while she details the many (!) criticisms that have been directed at the Shangri-Las, she doesn't mount an adequate defense. At times she almost agrees with their detractors, saying that "we" know they're "slightly tacky" and that the production is crude. Whether true or not, despite how far she attempts to go, it reads as though she has only a slight interest in the group, a slight interest in clarifying aspects of their sound. Someone new to the Shangri-Las would be unlikely to leave the book keen to check them out.

Which is to say it's less of an introduction for a general audience, more of a collection of pieces for the converted, or at least those who are already aware of the group. Speaking as someone who loves the Shangri-Las, despite Wolin's repeated and reckless use of "we," I mostly don't recognize the group presented in these pages. They are weird and the book is not. They are exuberant and the book is not. They are amusing and the book is not. Why should it matter? I think of the final line of a review by Christopher Hitchens: "It is altogether wrong that a book about Mark Twain should be boring."

Allow Bruce Lee to Demonstrate

     Like most people, my image of Bruce Lee was formed almost entirely by his landmark kung fu movie Enter the Dragon. (Ah, that title alone - nearly rejected in favor of a bland alternative for fear audiences would mistake it for a monster movie - promises something good.) One of the scenes I retain from my first viewing, as a kid, is when Lee is traveling by boat to the martial arts tournament. After pushing around a deckhand, a burly thug saunters over to Lee and starts throwing punches near his face. Occasionally the line he says in response to the provocation would resurface through the years: "Don't waste yourself." Good blunt advice. The thug wants to see how he fights. Lee suggests going to a small island nearby for an impromptu bout. The thug agrees and climbs into the dinghy first. Once he's in, Lee uncoils the rope it's attached to and lets him flail on the waves, cursing him.

The most controversial scene in Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, depicts the real Bruce Lee as a character, waiting around on the set of a show, wasting himself. Here, Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth, challenged by Lee to an impromptu bout, plays Bruce Lee to Bruce Lee himself and makes the kung fu legend a punch line. It's one of Tarantino's top three movies, by far his warmest and most personal, qualities I wouldn't have readily associated with the director, suffused with a deep affection for Tinseltown and the magic of the entertainment business, onscreen and off. But initially I found myself on the defensive when talking about the scene afterward with my bro. In the days that followed, apropos of nothing, I'd turn to him and say: "Not that bad." Or: "Not that bad?" I didn't know enough about Lee to say whether he was ever really, even at one time, the way he appears in the movie, arrogantly running his mouth. Then it emerged that Tarantino based his depiction on a single line he misattributed to Lee's wife, Linda, as discovered by an internet sleuth who checked his source. It's still one of the director's best. But now the movie should come with a warning for bad history in Lee's case - a strange bit of carelessness and ingratitude for a fan of kung fu movies and, if Kill Bill is any indication, of Lee in particular.

I'd been meaning to read a recently published Bruce Lee biography by Matthew Polly, actually, which was well reviewed. After the movie, it jumped near the top of the list.

The scene, it becomes clear, fails the man in two ways: Seeing it, one might think, when the cameras aren't rolling, he's just another wanna-be tough guy asking to be put in his place. In reality, he devoted his life to the martial arts, worked tirelessly to refine his technique, innovated, and, at every stage, eagerly answered a number of challenges. A running gag through the book is how often people test him, out of pique or curiosity, or are tested by him, in what seems to be a competitive spirit, and end up flying into walls or pools. Or worse. It wasn't movie invention at all. He was both entertainer and fighter. 

And, yes, sometimes a showboat. But also at every stage, just as often as he impresses people with his physical prowess, he charms people by sheer force of charisma. When not filming, one is more likely to find him clowning around or insisting on eating lunch with the movie crew rather than retreating to a hotel.

I was absorbed in the book as an account of the come-up. In some ways it's striking, given who we're talking about, how conventional much of it sounds. Bruce Lee was born in the US, raised in Hong Kong, and sent back to the states to straighten out his life. He started from the bottom, literally living in a closet, working a menial job. (He was a dishwasher for years. I can respect how much time he put in, although he only got a knife pulled on him once.) After entering the business, he scrambles for long periods, trying to find the right role. He's slighted, disappointed. The phone doesn't ring, he gets desperate. He hustles to keep himself and his growing family afloat. He makes lots of friends. He gets lucky. He desires the usual: money, fame, power, though not at the expense of his integrity. One glimpses how easily, despite everything he has to offer, he could have been another one of the countless people who dreamed of making it and went nowhere. He meets some of them along the way.

I was expecting racism, of course, yet I was still jarred by what I found. Here's the headline to his first interview: "Lee Hopes for Rotsa Ruck." He refuses to pursue the few parts available to an Asian person - manservant, model minority. Once he lands a major role on the Green Hornet, as the second lead, he gets paid $400 a week while the lead actor gets $2000 a week. (In fact, he gets paid less than every white cast member on the show, something he never found out.) His wife has to keep him secret while they're dating. When some family members learn about it, they intervene in an attempt to break them up. On the road promoting the show, journalists choose to focus on the mixed-race marriage. Commenting on their child, one writes: "his personality is a fascinating blend of the thoughtfulness of the East and the vigor of the West." The television producer William Dozier, the same guy who grossly underpaid him, informs him that the show is canceled like this: "Confucius say, 'Green Hornet to buzz no more.'" The sight of Bruce Lee getting manhandled would have been (and might still be) hilarious to certain people for another reason.... This is the landscape in which he was convinced he'd one day be the internationally famous star of a Hollywood movie, on his own terms.

And he did it. 

Polly tells the whole story, with relish and verve (and without veering into hagiography). Instead of psychoanalysis and interpretation, it's built on details and anecdotes, with brief histories of Hong Kong, US policy toward Chinese immigrants, the Shaw Brothers, and more interspersed throughout. If there are dull patches to Lee's life, Polly never lets it read that way. And he systematically addresses the major mysteries, such as what really happened in what he calls the most famous fight in kung fu history and the likely cause of Lee's early death at the age of 32, shrouded in speculation and superstition (a then-unknown ailment that has since been identified as a significant threat to athletes, heat stroke). I couldn't resist reading on and on during my day off, through hundreds of pages, until I was finished. 

Now I have to resist simply retelling many of the stories found throughout. So I'll limit myself to one: John Saxon travels to Hong Kong to shoot Enter the Dragon thinking he was supposed to star in it. Upon arriving, he meets Bruce Lee at his home, who asks Saxon to hold a shield he uses for training. He wants to demonstrate the power of his kick. Shield in hand, Saxon prepares himself. Lee kicks it. Saxon goes flying, smashing a chair behind him. Lee appears concerned. Saxon says he's all right. Lee says: "You broke my favorite chair." That's when he knew Lee was the one who was going to be the star of the movie. 

History By Way of Crime

     Strange: the James Ellroy novel American Tabloid sat on my shelf for quite a while, unread. My esteem for the first two entries of the LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, hadn't waned through the years. (LA Confidential and especially White Jazz, though not bad, are lesser efforts.) I knew he admired Don DeLillo's Libra, inspiring him to send a copy of AT to DeLillo when it came out, with a note informing him that he'd basically be promoting both books on his upcoming tour. I credit Ellroy with being one of the writers who've gone furthest to shape my idea of what constitutes real crime writing. Yet I held back. I was reluctant to see him fail to distinguish himself among the crowded field of those who've taken on one of the most infamous and tangled crimes of the 20th century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Occasionally, I'd try the opening, a scene of Howard Hughes shooting up, to see if it was time, and put it down soon after, no more reassured. His intention, I knew, was to write a historical novel. Based on his choice of introduction, I thought he might have produced a mere sensationalized version of (well-trod) history instead. As I don't realize enough, I was worried for nothing.

It's not sensationalized, he's not turned on by blood and bullets, but it is an appropriately nasty one. That's 500-plus pages of concentrated and assorted and, above all, focused nastiness, to be exact. Typically I'm prepared to give a novelist working at half that length some leeway for looseness of form. Here, it's not just the sentences and the paragraphs that are uniformly clipped to the essentials. There may not be an extraneous page in the entire book. Despite the sordid material, the structure, leaping at times between scenes, transcripts of conversations, sleazy tabloid articles, and more, is so precise, the movement so swift, it doesn't oppress as one might expect. It could also help explain why a certain odd verbal choice that runs through the book didn't wear me down: They. They. They. They. He. He. He. He.

Ellroy doesn't stretch credulity in connecting the Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, the CIA, and Cuba. The presentation may be harsh and stylized but it doesn't mean he's off the mark with the framework of his speculation. As for the writer's bombastic right-wing politics, or perhaps once bombastic, since these days his policy seems to be the less said, the better, on the page, at least, he's skeptical. He thinks little of J. Edgar Hoover and his obsession with terrorizing Communists/left-wing idealists. In one of many memorable scenes, an FBI agent breaks into the apartment of a business owner who's suspected of having shown solidarity with striking workers. He's interrupted from his humiliating intelligence gathering work by the man's wife. With weariness, she says: "So you people are common thieves now?" The agent knocks over a lamp as he runs out. (The women of the book are almost uniformly formidable, the few notable bright spots in a narrative dominated by crooked, bloodthirsty, and psychotic men.) The plot to murder Castro has as much to do with cash as it does with the threat of the Red Menace. And no one is more execrable than the racist thugs and klan members who violently oppose the mounting trend toward racial equality and justice.

The suspicion of sensationalism that may initially arise is further attenuated by his handling of historical figures and others. Howard Hughes shooting up, it turns out, is the least that can be mentioned about him. Ellroy's portrait has layers, all of them dark. The same goes with J. Edgar Hoover. He's not much impressed by John F. Kennedy, whose character aligns rather well with the fact, which I picked up years ago, that his favorite writer was Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. Robert Kennedy, though, despite a fatal lapse, seems to have the writer's respect for his integrity. Particularly admirable is how he inhabits each of their voices - the tics, the modulation of tone, the distinct personalities. And these are just a few among many more. Ellroy can do high and low, badinage and brutishness. 

Once more he builds a narrative around three men. Maybe one has a soul that finally emerges from the murk. Maybe. Whatever it is, it gets him killed.

Reading this book in 2019, the detail with which he delves into criminal activity engaged in by people at about every level of society remains useful. Reminder: Only the methods have changed. The FBI agent doesn't need to break into your home and rifle through your papers anymore. Technology has advanced enough so that you can be monitored on any device in your possession. Companies, eager to profit, are competing to devise better and better spy technology to sell to the highest bidder - namely governments that are enemies of democracy. Much of what goes on in the book is supposed to be concealed from the broader public. Ellroy succeeds in placing it within the reader's grasp.

I also think about those who've wondered, with some measure of hopelessness, if fiction that truly captures Trump and the madness of our times is possible. Writing like this, undaunted neither by the broad canvas nor the diversity of speech (invective included) and media nor the roiling atmosphere nor the depths necessary to limn, is one answer. In Ellroy's approach to history, no way could he escape appearing as he is: not a complicated man, not a controversial figure. A puke.

An Encounter With Everything

     In the few other collections by Alice Munro I've read, the seams are visible to varying degrees. The autobiographical stories, particularly those in The View From Castle Rock, tend to lose precision of form and drift, as if the writer had settled for constructing repositories for memories. Or they maintain precision only to concentrate entirely on something that finally reads like the unremarkable fact before it's transmuted into fiction. And there are times in each when an incident seems forced, conventionally storylike. But the seams aren't visible in Runaway. Each one is taut. Each one seeks out and deftly navigates complex territory.

My two favorites of hers are "Fiction" from Too Much Happiness and the best story by far in Castle Rock, "The Ticket." From Runaway I'm pleased to add three more: "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence." These can be read separately or, since they share a main character, Juliet, as a novella in three sections, a life in three parts.

I haven't much cared for the brick-size total novel that tries to contain everything. I've been impressed and yet longueurs and digressions, an unavoidable hazard of the form, tend to blunt the overall impact. Munro presents another counterargument against it. Taken together, these three stories, without aiming to, appear to contain everything, or come just as close, if I may be so bold to suggest as a mere 31-year-old: The ordinary. The bizarre. Landscapes, sketched. Convincing dreams. Death. A brutal death that nevertheless causes little more than a ripple, the thought of which, in hindsight (if ever), engenders another kind of pain. Major and minor characters. Unpredictable turns in the path that quickly seem logical and familiar. Family dynamics. Generations of family. Sexual history. Blowups. Madness. Work. Class. Youth and old age. Personal failures, seen and unseen. A mystery from the past, brooded upon, never solved though perhaps accepted. The uncertainty of the future. The passage of time. All of it presented not as epic or the torrent of an epoch but condensed to a few slim linked tales centering upon one woman. 

Elsewhere, she even manages to pull off a ludicrous plot twist. Rather than scoff, one is forced to acknowledge that, yes, ludicrous things happen too.

Here, more than in any of the other books, I get the sense that she's part of a highly select group: Chekhov and Carver. I'd add Runaway to my library. I'd recommend it as an introduction to her. More Munro, please.

A Brief Note on Strain

     In Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the biography of David Foster Wallace by DT Max, there's an anecdote about an anecdote the writer hears from a journalist who covers the porn industry. It's simple: The journalist once offended a porn star he was interviewing, so the porn star put him in a headlock. It made me laugh. I think anyone with some trace of a sense of humor could see why that's funny. I presume it made Wallace laugh, too, because he attempted to improve it, going on to describe how the journalist's glasses flew off and landed in another porn star's cleavage. And with that addition, he ruined a good story by overdoing it.

I remembered the Wallace anecdote recently after trying to read a novel advertised as comic. I couldn't stand it for more than a chapter. It's relentlessly overdone almost from the outset, straining for every laugh. Insufferable.

Fear, I went on to reflect, can manifest as strain and strain is always trouble. David Foster Wallace, haunted by the specter of genius and the suspicion that he was a fraud, predictably strained for a lot and that, combined with a weakness for losing himself in mental loops and dead ends, makes his writing mostly excruciating. Which pains me to say in the case of someone who put up an honest fight with himself til the end. One strains to be lyrical and ends up sounding flowery. One strains for profundity and ends up sounding portentous. One strains to be unpretentious and ends up lapsing into crudeness. And people burdened by the need to get laughs tend to strain for them. What's the allure of silence after all this strain? The weary or embittered writer decides that it beats a life of awkwardness and constriction and seemingly wasted effort.

The goal is to write fearlessly: All channels of lexicon, rhythm, memory, and imagination open. Eyes open. Resilient in the face of everything from technical issues to a tyrant. Guided by an intent that doesn't darken your soul, the soul that the work is meant in some way to capture.

One possible solution: this is not going to be amusing but still: the need to get a laugh, for example, is a self-imposed, unnecessary burden. Relieve yourself of it. Develop standards. Think about whether you're really laughing at those tweets or standup acts. Then, without neglecting quality control, write to make yourself laugh. Get the personal benefits of a laugh plus a bit more freedom of movement, which loosens you up to find more than laughs.... If someone joins you, that's strictly a bonus reward.

 

And hey. Sometimes it's not even a reward.

Wolf

     The best parts of The Little Red Chairs are good in the way I'm coming to expect Edna O'Brien to be good: communities of voices, a wealth of sharp, sumptuously rendered impressions of people and settings, a scope that can contain the minutiae of the local and the sweep of history, narration capable of switching smoothly from loving to combative and back again, relationships elucidated in all their messiness. Something that I haven't encountered before in her work until now and that can be added to the sizable list of what she does well is her unflinching handling of utter brutality on a mass scale, as remembered (or not) by those caught in the Bosnia-Serbia war of the 90s.

Years ago, someone I know said he didn't like No Country For Old Men, the film adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel by the Coen Brothers that is among my favorites of the crime genre. He argued that whatever the directors had to say was undermined by how they revelled in horror movie-style violence just to say it. For him, depictions of violence in art tend to be gratuitous, either too shocking and numbing to maintain a useful connection to the audience or deliberately so to get a cheap frisson. From time to time since then I've heard similar objections. In fact, just before beginning these notes, I read a review in the New York Times in which the writer compliments a novelist for refusing to show the terrible act of violence inflicted upon a group of women, thus preserving their dignity instead of turning them into props in a voyeuristic entertainment.

I wouldn't establish a rule one way or another. Restraint might be appropriate. On the other hand, those who've experienced or witnessed or been deeply haunted by accounts of acts of violence might seek to represent these memories with the same accurate immediacy as other, less grisly, memories. In this sense, readers or viewers don't have a right to disregard the idea of seeing it depicted. But they can  judge the intent and quality of the depiction. Upon reflection, it may very well turn out to be cheap. Or it may simply be a mere fragment of reality, perhaps as felt by Syrians and Mexicans and the Rohingya and a long weary line of others.... As for the Times review, the dichotomy is proven false by, among other things, O'Brien's novel. In her telling, there is nothing entertaining about the act, nor is the victim, seen fully fleshed out in her Irish home beforehand, any less human, in the midst of it or in the aftermath. 

I've encountered something similar in the most memorable scene of James Ross's Depression-era crime novel They Don't Dance Much. What cuts deepest isn't when the torturer puts a cigarette out in his victim's eye but a little later, when the victim, in a daze of immense pain, finally begs his torturer to have mercy and kill him. 1984 comes to mind too. Moments of human limits that succeed in disturbing.

A descent, in one line: "I began to believe I could breathe better dead than alive."

In the end, the novel, despite having excellent qualities, is mixed. For one thing, there are odd, rather prominent lapses. A character speaks in broken English yet uses words unlikely to be in the vocabulary of a fluent speaker, such as "suppurate" and "pulp" (in verb form). Another character helps advance the plot by doing something so stupid that it's an open question whether she could have really survived into adulthood to do it, though I admit I'm not prepared to say it's possible to capture the limits of human stupidity. Neither of the chapter-length dreams are convincing as dreams, with one, I'm startled to report in the case of so scrupulous a writer, ending with that classic twist: it was all a.... Finally, it could be argued that the conclusion she reaches is perfunctory.

A flawed response to Roberto Bolaño, perhaps, who's quoted for the book's epigraph. Her figure of evil, the war criminal Dr. Vlad Dragan (nicknamed "Vuk," which means "wolf"), could have stepped out of Nazi Literature in the Americas, reciting one of his poems in praise of bullets.  

Invisible Monster

     The man, the misanthrope, invisible or not, was always doomed. In HG Wells's The Invisible Man, I was expecting to find a sympathetic figure, the ailing stand-in for the reader. No doubt I had superheroes in mind. The Elephant Man too. Instead, I was surprised to discover Wells seems to be describing a mass shooter.

Griffin, the Invisible Man, fits a common profile. He's an angry loner. In recounting the years of his obsession with his work, people were, at best, incidental. But the word "invisible" and all forms thereof isn't used nearly as often as "fools." ("Anger" is a close second.) To Griffin, everyone, including those with a legitimate problem with him and those going about their ordinary business, is a fool. The story begins in media res, so one might initially think it's his desperate circumstances that have made him rude and, eventually, furious. It turns out, however, that he was the same man before he became invisible. Pausing to think about how one might actually survive invisibility, I mused: If he were just polite....

My mood darkens remembering all the times I've read about a mass shooter and his ravings, when I couldn't help but think something similar. If only he had--good sense? A measure of self-awareness? The Invisible Man is so utterly lost that such speculations are facile. His life is devoid of any sort of joy. He's indifferent to his father's death for no good reason. He's paranoid. He feels persecuted, then is persecuted, for good reason. He finally, inevitably, sees no other option but to reshape society through fear and violence, unleashing "the Terror." At which point he gets his hands on a gun and shoots somebody. 

The language is flat, even clumsy, at times. This is a minor flaw when weighed against Wells's gifts of psychological nuance and imagination, contained in a gripping yarn. One flaw that's not so easy to forget, as a feature of the writer's worldview as well as a sign of how he might go wrong in the future, is that the narrator seems to share something of the Invisible Man's contempt for people generally. At every turn Griffin sees fools (and dolts and stupid bumpkins). Yet, outside his observation, they're hardly if ever seen otherwise. When the hero, another scientist, explicitly described as a "hero," is introduced or maybe just after, he hears gunshots outside and says: "What are the asses up to now?" And in the final scene, the greed of an ignorant, lying, thieving bum represents a lingering danger.

Still, within the bounds of the novel, the Invisible Man is the worst of the worst. In a halfbaked (foolish?) attempt to improve his chances at escape, he reaches out to someone to become his accomplice. Explaining his choice, he says he recognizes another outcast. The self-pitying declaration illumines one way of interpreting invisibility. In the bloodshed that eventuates by book's end, in his vision of becoming a dictator, he desires the opposite: extreme visibility.  

Death by Laziness

    I'll be donating my copy of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov at the first opportunity but not without looking for another edition, just to skim. The novel is so disappointing I can't help thinking it must have been badly translated and severely abridged. Which is to say it fails Bolaño's test for a classic. 

Classic? I don't see how it could have sneaked past modified as a minor classic. It's crude, fatally so, crude by nearly every single measure. Before reading it, I'd picked up somewhere that it was supposed to be funny. A novel about an absurdly lazy man (or an insanely lazy man, as I muttered a few times at the outset, with a hopeful laugh) certainly invites comedy. But this, one of the only qualities that might convince the reader the book is better than it really is, mostly dissipates after the first section, with about 75% of the story to go, disqualifying it as a comic novel. And even here there are intermittent signs of trouble to come: two chapters that end with the ringing of a doorbell, characters who aren't so much people as masks representing different perspectives, who rather conveniently arrive on the same day, one after another after another. 

With an abrupt leap, from bedroom to social history, section two is a prolix critique of the village the titular character was born and raised in. It's rife with sweeping generalizations and finally devolves into a petty list of grievances against the country folk (including the offense of saving money). In section three, a woman suddenly appears in Oblomov's life to inspire him to get out of bed, establishing the primary conflict for the rest of the book between the possibilities and uncertainties of love and the easy comforts of lying about, alone, thinking no thoughts at all. 

On the long list of bad writing advice, one of the worst and most commonly uttered entries is: "show, don't tell." Countless books, true classics, are built on telling. ...Thus it falls apart with a nudge. But the central relationships of Oblomov provide the kind of material that allows the questionable line to continue spreading. The romance deepens mostly because it is bluntly, artlessly insisted upon. Characters simply announce that Oblomov is a charming, promising young man and a pure soul. One could, in mounting boredom and annoyance, reasonably demand to be "shown" proof of such claims, in scene and dialogue. But one could just as easily demand improved telling in the form of a more nuanced and detailed story in third-person summary.

Oblomov is didactic, and Oblomov is quite obviously supposed to be a Symbol of the Times, saying of his affliction things such as: "Am I alone in this, however? Look around you. The name of the tribe to which I belong is legion" (159). Come on. What's the difference between the Disease of Oblomovka, as it is coined here to ease him along into becoming shorthand, like Dorian Gray, and the ancient sin of sloth? It's as though no one has ever heard of it. In any case, somewhere within these pages there's a worthwhile message. The best line, a bit of advice, as it happens, is sternly worded by Oblomov's loyal friend Schtoltz. It's simple: Arm yourself with resolution and patiently, but firmly, pursue your way. The problem is that the novel is too inadequate a vehicle for the consequences of not heeding it. 

If that weren't enough, the book concludes on one of my most hated notes, the narrator informing the audience of his intention to write the book we've been reading the whole time. That's right: A lazy ending.

Literary Dreams: Roberto Bolaño

    I'm in the room of a modest hotel with Roberto Bolaño. We're talking about literature. Closer: I'm talking and he's listening. I get the sense that for some reason I've happily been going on and on and on. Awake, I find it hard to imagine monopolizing the conversation but this is a dream and that's how it goes, I'm afraid. Soon he indicates, with an understandable hint of weariness, that it's time for him to leave. I walk him downstairs. He's dressed casually, all in black. He's shorter and frailer than I'd pictured him, based on his writings. We stop in the lobby to say goodbye. I hug him. Normally I'm neutral on hugs. I don't resist them when they happen but I don't initiate them, either. Maybe I'm worried for him. Or maybe I fear I'll never see him again. For his part, Bolaño seems startled. I apologize. He says: No, no, it's all right. As we speak, we're still hugging. Behind us, in a room adjoining the lobby, a group of elderly people sits in a circle, grave and silent. I'm not sure who leads whom but, still in each other's arms, we make our way to the center of the circle. Once there, we separate and begin dancing. First he does a ridiculous dance. Then I try to outdo it. Then he tries to outdo mine. The elderly people sit up and start clapping along. Finally, Bolaño falls on the floor, laughing, I fall on a couch, laughing. An elderly woman sitting nearby tries to say something to me but I'm not listening. She gets mad. She lifts my shirt and pinches me on my lower back.